In the centenery year of Alan Bush's birth, a performance of his Piano Concerto,
the first apparently for over 30 years, stood out among several events which
have enabled at least the beginnings of an overview of this prolific and
distinctive composer.

Playing on this occasion for just under 55 minutes, the scale of Bush's concerto
is exceeded only by the Busoni (and no doubt those, all awaiting performance,
by Sorabji). Yet while the latter is an apotheosis of musical romanticism
before the onset of Busoni's often rarified mature idiom, the Bush is
recognisably an extension of the powerfully focused approach that had already
yielded the superb Dialectic for string quartet, amongst other chamber
and vocal works. Like Busoni, Bush marries a strongly wrought formal architecture
to a final vocal section which makes explicit the work's aesthetic: here,
the need for communist equity in a divided and unequal world. Provocative
stuff in the England of 1938, and Randall Swingler's verse, tough and abrasive,
no doubt detracted from its wider context.

The problem today is that the work has little more to offer than a period
take on a heady and combative era. One would not have expected overt melodic
interest in such a work - indeed Bush turned this apparent limitation to
his advantage on numerous occasions over the two decades following
Dialectic - but the harmonic drabness and motivic plainness of the
concerto was surprising.

The substantial opening movement evolves as an elaborate march fantasy, with
virtuoso piano writing which, if not decorative, is neither integral to an
argument that the rhythmically straitjacketed material seems incapable of
building. The scherzo makes scant use of its irregular metres, beyond prolonging
a five-minute movement to almost twice its natural duration (Paul Conway's
description, of "... a wild stratospheric ostinato ..." is fancifully
wide of the mark). The slow movement opens promisingly with sustained arioso
writing deep down in the orchestra, but loses focus at the piano's entry,
and builds to a sincere but emotionally cramped climax.

The finale resumes something of the martial import of the first movement,
pausing on a drum roll before an aggressively declaimed choral accusation
which all too self-consciously calls Schiller to mind. The remainder traverses
a sequence of co-ordinated but hardly memorable musical paragraphs, the supposed
naïvety of the text less worrying than the schematic dreariness of its
setting, and culminating in a peroration curiously redolent of Shostakovich's
second and third symphonies in its having impact without substance.

It would be easy to put the work's failure down to the simple premise of
forcing musical substance into a political mould. Yet a work such as Hans
Eisler's Deutsche Symphonie, substantially completed just prior to
the Bush, shows how a balance can be achieved where integrity of idea and
intrinsic worth of music are actually enhanced in the process. By comparison,
Bush's concerto, for all its scale and ambition, is simply not equal to its
task.

All credit to Rolf Hind for mastering a piano part such as he will have few
chances to repeat, and to Ashley Holland and Apollo Voices for extracting
as much character as they could from an ungrateful text in an unyielding
setting. The BBCSO sounded well prepared, under Leonard Slatkin's sympathetic
guidance (following on from a cohesive if slightly lacklustre Tippett Second
Symphony). Good that he should take the trouble to revive a work which, in
the event, cannot be said to warrant frequent revival.